Biennale College Musica 2026
Selection of up to 5 proposals by composers, sound artists and performers for a residency, research and production programme of new projects within the 70th International Festival of Contemporary Music organised by La Biennale di Venezia (10 - 24 October 2026).
“The grace of the child who encounters the world with the wonder of a first gaze – or rather, of a first act of listening, respectful of its mystery – is the same grace through which music has the power to disarm us” writes the Artistic Director Caterina Barbieri.
The young participants selected through the open call are invited to propose a project that explores music as an open and intuitive process, rather than as a closed and static form. Just as children’s play is able to transform rules and limitations into a space of invention and creative vision, the young participants are encouraged to integrate performative and compositional practices linked to improvisation and aleatoric processes, exploring liminal territories between electronic music, new audiovisual technologies, acoustic instrumentation, and performance.
“For many artists, music is a tool of purification and healing from early childhood,” writes Artistic Director Caterina Barbieri: “a natural process of catharsis through which the pain of the world can be transformed into beauty, thus protecting the human essence”. From this perspective, the young participants are encouraged to approach artistic creation as a process of collective catharsis and transformation, with the possibility of exploring participatory and dynamic modes of engagement, as an alternative to the passive and frontal format of the traditional concert. In this sense, participants are invited to consider, within their artistic proposal, the integration of a possible dialogue with the city of Venice and its social fabric, in line with an idea of cultural programming that restores to art its profound therapeutic and communal value, at once spiritual and political.
“Music is the childhood of the spirit: an experience that reconnects us to a primeval state of innocence, vitality, and creative power” writes Artistic Director Caterina Barbieri. Like childhood itself, which lives fully in the here and now, music brings us back to the sacredness of the present, to the vulnerability of emotion, and to the open horizon of experimentation: music-making is understood as an embodied and revolutionary act, capable of generating innovation through mutual listening and the interaction between sound, body, and space.
The eligible musical project categories are:
- live performance (with optional audiovisual component)
- acousmatic composition with multi-channel diffusion
- audiovisual installation
Figures of excellence from various fields of artistic and theoretical research in contemporary music (ranging from academic research to performance practice, from audiovisual multimedia research to club culture, from electroacoustic music to sound design) will assist young participants in developing their own musical projects through a residency programme held in Venice at the studios of CIMM (Centro di Informatica Musicale e Multimediale della Biennale di Venezia) and other spaces within the Arsenale of Venice.
The selection will be made taking into account the research areas of the different mentors, so that each one can be the direct supervisor of one or two selected projects.
Those selected will attend lectures and conferences held by the mentors and work in residence, creating new projects to be scheduled within the 70th International Festival of Contemporary Music organised by La Biennale di Venezia.